Privacy

Farol for Mac

Farol runs on your Mac and keeps your sessions and settings there. It asks GitHub whether a newer version exists, which shows GitHub your IP address like any download does. Nothing about you or your work goes to a Farol service, since there is none besides the relay described below.

When you use its GitHub, GitLab or Jira features, Farol talks to those services directly with the tools and accounts already set up on your Mac.

The agents you run in it, like Claude Code or Codex, talk to their own services under their own terms.

Remote and Farol Remote for iPhone

Remote is off until you turn it on. When you pair a phone, your Mac and the phone exchange keys by way of a code you scan. From then on the names of your sessions, what their terminals show and what you type travel between the two encrypted end to end. Only your Mac and your phone can read them.

The iPhone app keeps its key and the Mac it is paired with on the phone. The camera is used to scan the pairing code and for nothing else.

The relay

Your Mac and your phone meet through a relay at relay.farol.sh, run by Lucas Neves Pereira and hosted by Railway. It passes encrypted messages on and cannot read them. It stores none of them.

Like any server it sees the IP addresses that connect to it. It counts connections to limit abuse and does not write addresses to its log. Its log holds totals only: how many rooms, connections and notifications.

You can run your own relay and point Farol at it in Settings. The relay and the protocol are open source.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, the phone gives your Mac the address Apple uses to reach it. When an agent waits or finishes, the Mac hands that address to the relay, which asks Apple to deliver the notification. The relay does not keep it. Which session the notification is about is sealed so that only your phone can read it, and the relay and Apple see that an agent is waiting or has finished, nothing more.

Speaking a reply

The microphone button turns speech into text on the phone when the phone can do that for your language. When it cannot, Apple's dictation service does it, as with the keyboard's microphone key, under Apple's privacy policy. Nothing you say goes to Farol or the relay.

Questions

Open an issue on GitHub or ask on Discord.